Knitting isn't so hard… sometimes

Yarn Spotlight: Rome

I don’t usually wax poetic about a specific brand of yarn. It makes me feel like a (unpaid) corporate shill. But in this case, this yarn is so exceptional, so weird, and so awesome that I can’t help myself.

Mom bought me a handful of skeins of HPKY’s Rome yarn for my birthday. And when I opened the box, I immediately put down the project I was working on to start knitting with the Rome Yarn.

It’s incredibly fluffy and soft. Like kittens and clouds, and… I don’t know… ducklings. It’s mostly baby alpaca and Merino, with a little bit of nylon.

At first glance, Rome looks like unspun pencil roving, but when you start working with it, you realize it’s incredibly strong and totally not split-y. When you look closer, you see that it’s actually really cool space-aged yarn. What they’ve done is take a super-fine nylon fiber and knit it into an I-cord. Then, they filled the little knit tube with the alpaca and merino. See? (It’s crazy hard to photograph, but this was the best I could do. If you squint really hard, you can kind of see the I-cord stitching).

Because the alpaca and merino fibers haven’t actually been spun together, your finished project ends up extra fluffy and cuddly. I made the HPKY Bias Shawl with my Rome yarn, and it’s the warmest, most wonderful thing I’ve made in a long time. The squishy-ness of garter stitch combined with the fluffiness of the yarn makes it unbelievably lovely.

If you see a skein (or two) of HPKY’s Rome, grab it up. Even if you don’t knit with it, you can keep it around to pet like a kitten. I wouldn’t judge.